Is your Wordpress Permalink right?

by 7 replies
8
Thousands, if not millions of Wordpress blogs are optimized for the permalink:

/%category%/%postname%/

This is because so called "SEO Experts" recommend them.

But since when is this right?

"For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text "page slug" as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties). So, it is best to have at least two path segments in your post's permalink structure such as /%year%/%postname%/ or even /posts/%postname%/. (Some people recommend /%post_id%/%postname%/ which works for performance reasons but others recommend against it because it is unfriendly to users in the many contexts in which users interact with URLs.)"

Retrieved from: Using Permalinks « WordPress Codex

Yes, we all agree starting with a number is not SEO friendly, but if you are planning to stick with a blog for a long time, you should be starting with a number silo for efficiency reasons.

Personally I use /%postname%.html

Mostly because the blogs I have, don't require the efficiency (they are for short term use).

That little .html makes a huge difference, according to Matt Cutts.

And it should!

You don't know how many people get slapped by Google because of duplicate content issues.

Ex.

www.blogname.com/category/postname/

is the same as

www.blogname.com/category/postname

OOPS, who ever new?

There are plugins that deal with this problem, but nonetheless, duplicate content proves to be an issue to many bloggers.

Now why don't I have /%category%/ in my permalinks structure?

I think just the postname helps keep my URLs looking clean and memorable. The category just isn't for me.


I hope some of you picked something up from this post. Do you think efficiency matters to you, or is SEO the crux of your blog?
#search engine optimization #permalink #wordpress
  • I don't use the category bit in my postname, I use /%postname%/ but I am interested to find out more about the .html on the end and why that makes such a big difference. Have you tested to see if this does make a difference?
  • I personally haven't. But Matt Cutts being such an important figure for Google SEO has recommended it.

    My friend (a longtime Wordpress User) said that he tested different permalink structures and for SEO and /%postname%.html had the best results.
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
  • %postname% for me too, super long urls are not great for seo, I find hand editing long titles down is enough work without having to deal with categories in the path too.
  • I am aware of this, and sometimes it can be confusin..and yes, *.html would be a simple solution. BUT i dont think that there is big of a "penalization" going on..i think Google is smart enough.

    It is almost absurd to assume that a site gets "slapped" due to a "/" more or less - but its WAY more transparent if you know that an URL ending with "/" would always be a directory.
  • I use /%postname%/ and seem to get best SERP results from this. I also have never heard about the .html theory, so I guess I'll have to do some more research on it. If it's something that's going to help, I'm all for it.
    • [1] reply
    • I personally use %postname%, dont like to use /%category%/ because I want don't want the category in my link
      • [1] reply
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